A Return to Acting That's From the Heart

By PATRICK HEALY

Published: May 29, 2011

JOE MANTELLO was a 22-year-old actor, trained in the classics and fresh to New York, when he set out for the Public Theater one snowy night in 1985 to see ''The Normal Heart,'' Larry Kramer's play about the first years of AIDS. Watching the protagonist Ned Weeks -- a blunt, opinionated gay man not unlike himself -- Mr. Mantello understood his need to take action in the face of death and denial, he recalled recently. If others found ''The Normal Heart'' a statistics-laden screed, Mr. Mantello felt a visceral recognition that Moli? and Sophocles had never triggered.

''I tend to go toward things that make me afraid,'' Mr. Mantello said, ''so as a young gay man in New York at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic I had to go toward it. I'd never connected to a character so much before.''

Soon afterward Mr. Mantello organized a reading of ''The Normal Heart'' in his fifth-floor walk-up at 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Fellow graduates of the North Carolina School of the Arts streamed past crack addicts in the lobby and took their places and scripts in a circle of borrowed chairs in Mr. Mantello's living room. Silently he directed himself as Ned, a part he was burning to experience right away, because he had no reason to think he ever would. Mr. Mantello's best friend, the actor T. Scott Cunningham, played Felix, Ned's lover and, ultimately, his inspiration to keep fighting apathy toward AIDS.

A photograph of a boyish, sparkling-eyed Mr. Cunningham now sits on Mr. Mantello's dressing room table at the Golden Theater. Twenty-six years after first hearing Ned's howl -- ''God, you are relentless. And as cheery as Typhoid Mary,'' Felix says -- Mr. Mantello is playing the role in the first Broadway production of ''The Normal Heart.'' Just as Felix encouraged Ned, the memory of Mr. Cunningham -- an Off Broadway fixture who died in 2009 from complications of pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome -- helped spur Mr. Mantello to play Ned, a performance that has earned him a Tony Award nomination this spring for best actor in a play. But lost friends were only one of the reasons for the decision, a weighty one given that he had long ago given up performing.

''Doing the play was just one of those moments where you either say yes or you spend the rest of your life thinking, 'What would have happened if I'd said yes?' '' explained Mr. Mantello, whose expressively wide, chestnut-colored eyes were like jolts of electricity when he spoke in the dimly lighted dressing room.

If every actor or director has one play that resonates more than other works, Mr. Mantello's is ''The Normal Heart.'' It prompted him to join the Gay Men's Health Crisis as a buddy, bringing in food trays that were left outside hospital room doors for AIDS patients. (The founding of that organization generates much of the arguing in the play.) It was a touchstone as friends died of AIDS. It led him to eschew canonical works for performing in new, red-blooded plays like Tony Kushner's gay epic, ''Angels in America,'' which earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in 1993 as the tormented, self-centered Louis.

Mr. Mantello eventually turned his instinct for organizing into a career as a Tony-winning director, again mostly of new work: plays with gay themes like ''Love! Valour! Compassion!,'' ''Take Me Out,'' and ''The Pride,'' as well as musicals like ''Assassins,'' ''9 to 5,'' and his Broadway blockbuster, ''Wicked.''

That directing career seemed everything to Mr. Mantello -- he gradually stopped auditioning for acting roles after ''Angels'' -- until last year, when he mentioned to the actor Joel Grey that Ned Weeks was the one role that got away. (Brad Davis and then Mr. Grey played the role in the original Public Theater production, and Raul Esparza played Ned in a 2004 revival at the Public.) Mr. Grey, who was Mr. Mantello's first Wizard in ''Wicked'' on Broadway, happened to be pulling together a benefit reading of ''The Normal Heart'' in Los Angeles at the time.

''If you ever do it in New York....'' Mr. Mantello replied, trailing off before fully committing, as both men recalled the conversation. Mr. Grey soon began mulling the idea of a ''Normal Heart'' benefit in New York as well, leaving the actor with a decision to make.

Mr. Mantello's choice to stop acting in 1994, after ''Angels,'' surprised many working in New York theater beyond his closest friends. Growing up in Rockford, Ill., he was drawn to idiosyncratic actors -- ''I was probably the only 10-year-old who adored Sandy Dennis'' -- but felt self-conscious at times during his own performances. His training in North Carolina seemed oriented, he said, toward ironing out any singularities in the students, and preparing them for the classical repertory in regional theater.

''The pinnacle achievement was to project neutrality as an actor,'' Mr. Mantello said, so he conveyed a certain blank-slate formality at auditions. (He would bring a briefcase, shake hands, and say, ''Hello. Joseph Mantello.'')